Lisa Papineau – Night Moves (CD)

The sedate sounds of Lisa Papineau remind listeners of The Postal Service. The mixture of ghostly vocals with a slightly more upbeat electronic instrumentation provides an interesting style that is still vibrant and fresh. This bit of sedate sound disappears completely by the time that Lisa comes up with “Shucking. Jiving.” In a sense, I would have to tie Papineau’s work to that done by acts like the Propellerheads and Portishead in the late nineties; there are enough distinct styles present in any one given track on “Night Moves” that listeners could spend hours trying to distinguish all of them. Thus during “Power and Glory, Pt. 1”, the softly-sung vocals of Papineau work with the electronic, almost seventies (Vangelis, Wendy Carlos) like composition.

Hints of nineties alternative and indie rock are present in Papineau’s voice, while hints of trip-hop present themselves in the instrumentation. When a song like “The Quiet Storm” starts, one is not sure whether an early nineties rap track will start; the instrumentation sounds that way before Papineau kicks in with a Bjork meets Christina Aguilera vocal blend. The results are revolutionary and what is present on “Night Moves” is just interesting at all levels. Each of the tracks may have a similar sound to the rest of the tracks on “Night Moves”, but there are so many subtle differences in each song that individuals can stick with the disc without getting bored in any sense.

The blend of styles on “Night Moves” is something that individuals can appreciate, as someone into pop music can hear the paeans to pop, while those people that dig electronic music can hear more than their fair share of electronic music. Papineau has a sleep hit on eir hands, and while there is not the track that will break eir big in Billboard, there are quite a few tracks that will get high amounts of play. I do not know how well further discs done in this vein would do; Papineau may just have to try different things with each and every subsequent disc that ey does. Here’s to hoping that we can become intimate with Papineau in other ways with future albums. Listeners can get to know eir through this album, but this is only one fragment of an entire person. There just is a lot more left in Papineau’s arsenal that will slowly come out in the next few years or decades.